In Greece, women speak of mothering as "within the nature" of a woman. But this durable association of motherhood with femininity exists in tension with the highest incidence of abortion and one of the lowest fertility rates in Europe. In this setting, how do women think of themselves as proper individuals, mothers, and Greek citizens? In this anthropological study of reproductive politics and ethics in Athens, Greece, Heather Paxson tracks the effects of increasing consumerism and imported biomedical family planning methods, showing how women's "nature" is being transformed to meet crosscutting claims of the contemporary world. Locating profound ambivalence in people's ethical evaluations of gender and fertility control, Paxson offers a far-reaching analysis of conflicting assumptions about what it takes to be a good mother and a good woman in modern Greece, where assertions of cultural tradition unfold against a backdrop of European Union integration, economic struggle, and national demographic anxiety over a falling birth rate.
Cheese is alive, and alive with meaning. Heather Paxson's beautifully written anthropological study of American artisanal cheesemaking tells the story of how craftwork has become a new source of cultural and economic value for producers as well as consumers. Dairy farmers and artisans inhabit a world in which their colleagues and collaborators are a wild cast of characters, including plants, animals, microorganisms, family members, employees, and customers. As "unfinished" commodities, living products whose qualities are not fully settled, handmade cheeses embody a mix of new and old ideas about taste and value. By exploring the life of cheese, Paxson helps rethink the politics of food, land, and labor today.
Between 1944 and 1996, Guatemala experienced a revolution, counterrevolution, and civil war. Playing a pivotal role within these national shifts were students from Guatemala's only public university, the University of San Carlos (USAC). USAC students served in, advised, protested, and were later persecuted by the government, all while crafting a powerful student nationalism. In no other moment in Guatemalan history has the relationship between the university and the state been so mutable, yet so mutually formative. By showing how the very notion of the middle class in Guatemala emerged from these student movements, this book places an often-marginalized region and period at the center of histories of class, protest, and youth movements and provides an entirely new way to think about the role of universities and student bodies in the formation of liberal democracy throughout Latin America.
Between 1944 and 1996, Guatemala experienced a revolution, counterrevolution, and civil war. Playing a pivotal role within these national shifts were students from Guatemala's only public university, the University of San Carlos (USAC). USAC students served in, advised, protested, and were later persecuted by the government, all while crafting a powerful student nationalism. In no other moment in Guatemalan history has the relationship between the university and the state been so mutable, yet so mutually formative. By showing how the very notion of the middle class in Guatemala emerged from these student movements, this book places an often-marginalized region and period at the center of histories of class, protest, and youth movements and provides an entirely new way to think about the role of universities and student bodies in the formation of liberal democracy throughout Latin America.
Even ardent fans of Andy Warhol (1928–1987) may be surprised to learn that the artist created a significant body of western work. In fact, Warhol was drawn to the lore and lure of the American West throughout his life. He was heavily influenced by the mythology and iconography of the American West, conveyed primarily through film and television, and revealed at various points in his life by toys, clothing, and travel. His lifelong fascination with the West culminated with his 1986 series Cowboys and Indians, a print portfolio that represents an important milestone in the artist’s late career and a shift in the conception of contemporary western American art. One of the last major projects Warhol completed prior to his death, Cowboys and Indians received very little critical or public attention at the time of its release and remains one of the most understudied aspects of the artist’s career. Warhol and the West explores for the first time the range of western imagery Warhol produced. New scholarship examines how Warhol’s western work merges the artist’s ubiquitous portrayal of celebrities with his interest in cowboys, American Indians, and other western motifs. His work in the western genre is immediately recognizable, impressive, daring, inspirational, and sometimes confrontational. This body of work furthers our understanding of how the American West infiltrates the public’s imagination through contemporary art and popular culture. The major traveling exhibition includes more than 100 objects and works of art including source materials revealing Warhol’s process. The accompanying catalogue will feature essays by heather ahtone of the American Indian Cultural Center and Museum (AICCM) in Oklahoma City, Faith Brower of the Tacoma Art Museum, and Seth Hopkins of the Booth Western American Art Museum, as well as 12 additional contributors: Tony Abeyta, Sonny Assu, Gregg Deal, Lara M. Evans, Michael R. Grauer, Frank Buffalo Hyde, Thomas S. Kalin, Gloria Lomahaftewa, Daryn A. Melvin, Andrew Patrick Nelson, Chelsea Weathers, and Rebecca West. Published in association with Tacoma Art Museum. Exhibition dates: Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, GA: August 25–December 31, 2019 National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City, OK: January 31–May 10, 2020 Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA: Summer 2020
This book examines patterns of political mobilization among groups in Mexico whose livelihoods have been threatened by trade opening, fiscal retrenchment, and market liberalization. Using data from case studies of a worker-based movement and a farmer-based movement, Williams argues that economic transition, in altering modes of state-society bargaining, has shifted the locus of contention and has altered the form and shape of distributive protest. Williams further argues that social movements make strategic choices in their use of resources in order to widen their constituencies and extend the length of their insurgencies.
Heather James examines the ways in which Shakespeare handles the inheritance and transmission of the Troy legend. She argues that Shakespeare's use of Virgil, Ovid and other classical sources demonstrates the appropriation of classical authority in the interests of developing a national myth, and goes on to distinguish Shakespeare's deployment of the myth from 'official' Tudor and Stuart ideology. James traces Shakespeare's reworking of the myth in Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline and The Tempest, and shows how the legend of Troy in Queen Elizabeth's day differed from that in the time of King James. The larger issue the book confronts is the directly political one of the way in which Shakespeare's textual appropriations participate in the larger cultural project of finding historical legitimation for a realm that was asserting its status as an empire.
Theatre has often served as a touchstone for moments of political change or national definition and as a way of exploring cultural and ethnic identity. In this 2003 book, Heather Nathans examines the growth and influence of the theatre in the development of the young American Republic, from the Revolution through to the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800. Unlike many works on the early American theatre, this book explores the lives and motives of the people working behind the scenes to establish a new national drama. Some of the most famous figures in American history, from George Washington to Sam Adams, from John Hancock to Alexander Hamilton, battled over the creation of the American theatre. The book traces their motives and strategies - suggesting that for many of these men, the question of whether or not Americans should go to the playhouse meant the difference between the success and failure of the Revolutionary mission.
In this groundbreaking study, Heather Jones provides the first in-depth and comparative examination of violence against First World War prisoners. She shows how the war radicalised captivity treatment in Britain, France and Germany, dramatically undermined international law protecting prisoners of war and led to new forms of forced prisoner labour and reprisals, which fuelled wartime propaganda that was often based on accurate prisoner testimony. This book reveals how, during the conflict, increasing numbers of captives were not sent to home front camps but retained in western front working units to labour directly for the British, French and German armies - in the German case, by 1918, prisoners working for the German army endured widespread malnutrition and constant beatings. Dr Jones examines the significance of these new, violent trends and their later legacy, arguing that the Great War marked a key turning-point in the twentieth-century evolution of the prison camp.
Beyond Combat investigates how the Vietnam War both reinforced and challenged the gender roles that were key components of American Cold War ideology. Refocusing attention onto women and gender paints a more complex and accurate picture of the war's far-reaching impact beyond the battlefields. Encounters between Americans and Vietnamese were shaped by a cluster of intertwined images used to make sense of and justify American intervention and use of force in Vietnam. These images included the girl next door, a wholesome reminder of why the United States was committed to defeating Communism, and the treacherous and mysterious 'dragon lady', who served as a metaphor for Vietnamese women and South Vietnam. Heather Stur also examines the ways in which ideas about masculinity shaped the American GI experience in Vietnam and, ultimately, how some American men and women returned from Vietnam to challenge homefront gender norms.
The sottie was a short, comical play which flourished in France from about 1440 to 1560. Although a vital part of late medieval popular culture, this dramatic genre has received scant critical attention. In this study, Dr Arden adds to our understanding of the sottie by examining in detail the subjects satirised in the plays, the dramatic structure underlying this satire, the attitudes expressed by the plays, and their social function in late medieval France. Through an approach combining critical readings of the texts with historical study of class structure and its evolution in this period, she offers a fresh interpretation of a remarkable type of satire. In addition to analysing the undercurrent of class conflict in late medieval theatre, Dr Arden clarifies lower-class values of the period and suggests a reason for the widespread fascination with folly and the fool in the late Middle Ages.
Across centuries, the Islamic Middle East hosted large populations of Christians and Jews in addition to Muslims. Today, this diversity is mostly absent. In this book, Heather J. Sharkey examines the history that Muslims, Christians, and Jews once shared against the shifting backdrop of state policies. Focusing on the Ottoman Middle East before World War I, Sharkey offers a vivid and lively analysis of everyday social contacts, dress, music, food, bathing, and more, as they brought people together or pushed them apart. Historically, Islamic traditions of statecraft and law, which the Ottoman Empire maintained and adapted, treated Christians and Jews as protected subordinates to Muslims while prescribing limits to social mixing. Sharkey shows how, amid the pivotal changes of the modern era, efforts to simultaneously preserve and dismantle these hierarchies heightened tensions along religious lines and set the stage for the twentieth-century Middle East.
Examining the intersections between musical culture and a British project of reconstruction from the 1940s to the early 1960s, this study asks how gestures toward the past negotiated issues of recovery and renewal. In the wake of the Second World War, music became a privileged site for re-enchanting notions of history and community, but musical recourse to the past also raised issues of mourning and loss. How was sound figured as a historical object and as a locus of memory and magic? Wiebe addresses this question using a wide range of sources, from planning documents to journalism, public ceremonial and literature. Its central focus, however, is a set of works by Benjamin Britten that engaged both with the distant musical past and with key episodes of postwar reconstruction, including the Festival of Britain, the Coronation of Elizabeth II and the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral.
Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience and Wordsworth's contributions to Lyrical Ballads were both published in the last decade of the eighteenth century. The similarities between the two collections have often been noticed. However, as Dr Glen argues, to assimilate both collections to a common 'Romanticism' is to obscure that which is most distinctive in each. Each was shaped by and responsive to very different social and cultural pressures in the England of its time and offers a very different vision of human possibility. Moreover each poet uses the language which is the intimate register and vehicle of his society's experience in a very different way. This is a challenging and persuasive interpretation of poems too often seen as part of a coherent and accepted literary tradition: poems which present a continuing challenge to all who would explore possibilities for creative social change. It will be of great interest to all serious readers of Romantic poetry.
Though the short story is often regarded as central to the Irish canon, this text was the first comprehensive study of the genre for many years. Heather Ingman traces the development of the modern short story in Ireland from its beginnings in the nineteenth century to the present day. Her study analyses the material circumstances surrounding publication, examining the role of magazines and editors in shaping the form. Ingman incorporates recent critical thinking on the short story, traces international connections, and gives a central part to Irish women's short stories. Each chapter concludes with a detailed analysis of key stories from the period discussed, featuring Joyce, Edna O'Brien and John McGahern, among others. With its comprehensive bibliography and biographies of authors, this volume will be a key work of reference for scholars and students both of Irish fiction and of the modern short story as a genre.
This book re-examines some of Shakespeare’s best-known texts in the light of their engagement with the forms of deprivation which threatened domestic security in early modern England. Burglary, the loss of home, and the early deaths of parents emerge as central and very telling issues in Shakespearean drama. Heather Dubrow recovers the particular significance of home, especially in relation to gender, male and female subjectivity. She relates the plays to Shakespeare’s poetry (The Rape of Lucrece), and to early modern cultural texts such as the literature of roguery; she also introduces illuminating perspectives from contemporary social problems (notably crime), twentieth-century poetry, and popular culture. One of the most vital aspects of this fascinating study is to connect concerns at the cutting edge of cultural studies (such as the construction of transgressive Others) to more traditional literary concerns such as genre, especially the workings of romance and pastoral.
Heather James examines the ways in which Shakespeare handles the inheritance and transmission of the Troy legend. She argues that Shakespeare’s use of Virgil, Ovid and other classical sources demonstrates the appropriation of classical authority in the interests of developing a national myth, and goes on to distinguish Shakespeare’s deployment of the myth from ‘official’ Tudor and Stuart ideology. James traces Shakespeare’s reworking of the myth in Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline, and The Tempest, and shows how the legend of Troy in Queen Elizabeth’s day differed from that in the time of King James. The larger issue the book confronts is the directly political one of the way in which Shakespeare’s textual appropriations participate in the larger cultural project of finding historical legitimation for a realm that was asserting its status as an empire.
This book re-examines some of Shakespeare’s best-known texts in the light of their engagement with the forms of deprivation which threatened domestic security in early modern England. Burglary, the loss of home, and the early deaths of parents emerge as central and very telling issues in Shakespearean drama. Heather Dubrow recovers the particular significance of home, especially in relation to gender, male and female subjectivity. She relates the plays to Shakespeare’s poetry (The Rape of Lucrece), and to early modern cultural texts such as the literature of roguery; she also introduces illuminating perspectives from contemporary social problems (notably crime), twentieth-century poetry, and popular culture. One of the most vital aspects of this fascinating study is to connect concerns at the cutting edge of cultural studies (such as the construction of transgressive Others) to more traditional literary concerns such as genre, especially the workings of romance and pastoral.
This book provides a useful summary of the principles involved in teaching adults as well as a wealth of activities specifically designed for adult learners. The text is divided into three sections: Section I provides an introduction to the adult language learner and discusses the issues of assessment/placement and course/lesson organization. Section II gives teachers techniques for building community in the classroom. Section III provides activities designed for students at various levels that are organized thematically around topics such as self-identification, food, clothing, and work.
Beyond Combat investigates how the Vietnam War both reinforced and challenged the gender roles that were key components of American Cold War ideology. Refocusing attention onto women and gender paints a more complex and accurate picture of the war's far-reaching impact beyond the battlefields. Encounters between Americans and Vietnamese were shaped by a cluster of intertwined images used to make sense of and justify American intervention and use of force in Vietnam. These images included the girl next door, a wholesome reminder of why the United States was committed to defeating Communism, and the treacherous and mysterious 'dragon lady', who served as a metaphor for Vietnamese women and South Vietnam. Heather Stur also examines the ways in which ideas about masculinity shaped the American GI experience in Vietnam and, ultimately, how some American men and women returned from Vietnam to challenge homefront gender norms.
